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Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
Many people may be familiar with one of Norman's other books, "The Design of Everyday Things". Well, the good news is that this book is as engaging, and the bad news is that it isn't all that much different. Norman, the uber-advocate of person centered design, uses this book to debunk the motto of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair "Science Finds, Industry Applies, and Man Conforms".
Things That Make Us Smart has a double meaning. Norman spends a decent chunk of this book explaining how humans have very defined cognitive abilities, like pattern recognition. Not only do we have these cognitive abilities, but we're good at them. If you are ever at a cocktail party (which most geeks avoid) and someone says your name, you are likely to pick it up out of a host of other ambient noises in the room. So the first meaning of the title of this book is that humans have abilities that prove we are smart. The second meaning is that we have created cognitive artifacts to extend the limits of our mentalities. These are the "things" that make us smart. Now, we are used to thinking of tools expanding our physical abilities. We use a hammer so we don't pulp our hands while smashing them against the head of a nail. We use a car because we can't run that fast. What Norman explains is that we have also created a ton of tools that help us expand our mind's capability.
It starts with cuneiform. We have bad memories for facts, so when we wanted to remember facts we started writing them on clay tablets. Books were great innovations, since they help us not only remember stuff, but allow us to write down our thoughts and share them with people we'll never meet. Computers have developed as the latest tool we use to expand our cognitive abilities. They do things we can't do very well, and vice versa. We can only hold about 5-7 things in our memory at any one time. Computers can handle lots more. Still, before you start looking for your personal Hal, there are important things that we can do that our computers cannot. Even computers running un a Linux OS. A computer sees a picture of a butterfly as just dots on a screen (yes, I know they are working on this at Bellcore) while we are immediately able to apply meaning to those dots. My favorite example that Norman uses is shooting a free throw. The very things that for us are easy, like identifying the hoop, are incredibly tough for the computer. However, whereas we have big troubles with accuracy the computer can shoot all day once it has figured out the calculation.
Now this would be a great situation if we were intelligent about it. Technology helps us to do the things nature did not wire our brains to do. However, so much of the current market of technology is centered around what the machine needs or can do that we are expecting humans to conform to the technology, making us the tools to the machines. It's an easy trap to fall into. Humans can tolerate a lot of ambiguity. It's one of those things that makes us smart, but Norman argues that we should be designing in a way that augments our lives, not living in a way that validates our design.
What's Good?
This is a great introduction to Donald Norman for those who have not read him. A great bathroom book, you can skip around alot and the examples are engaging. The early part of the book also does a great job of teaching cognitive psychology, with sensical examples and descriptions of human cognitive processes. Also, the theory of user centered design is extremely important, and Norman does a wonderful job of supporting its tenets.
What's Bad? If you already know a lot about Human Computer Interaction, or are pretty good with cognitive psychology, this book may seem to slow. Also, it's only a mild variation on other Norman books, though if you've not read any to this point, start with this one. The second half of the book is light on quantative evidence, but that's more because you've entered the land of large statements about the meaning of life from the author rather than that he doesn't know how to quantify results.
So What's In It For Me?
If you do any programming, or put together sites for general viewing, this is a valuable book for the argument towards user centered design. Almost anyone can find something out of this offering, from the defense of lowly human cognition, to the descriptions of how we can use technology more intelligently.
Other important links... Buy this book at Amazon .
Buy Norman's latest book, The Invisible Computer, which we'll review soon. If you're interested in serious usability engineering, this is the book to get, Usability Engineering by Jakob Nielsen.
An interesting series of books to look at with regard to this is Gregory Benford's Galactic Centre somethinglogy.
:-)
/.ers enter their .sigs manually.
Without spoiling too much (apart from a large part of the basic premise...), a large part of it deals with the prevalence of machine life forms (the Mechs) over biological life forms. It has little bits about machine evolution and so on - very interesting reading, even if it has got all that plot sandwiched in between
- REAL
Computers are by their nature, finite. There is a limit to their memory, processor speed, etc.
On the other hand, The human brain does not have that same restriction. Sure, we have a finite number of neurons, but noone knows for sure just how memories are stored or how new thoughts arise. (My personal view is our minds have an infinate amount of "storage space" available and can allocate this space on demand, but that's a whole different issue)
Somehow, I just know that human capabilites will never be eclipsed by computers. Also, I do not believe that computers will ever become "self-aware" (sorry, Data). Consciousness is reserved for the domain of biological creatures.
Of course, this is not to say that computers will be incapable of acting human or simulating a self-aware being. I think eventually computers (robots) will be able to simulate human actions/emotion, but they will still lack that "human nature" (hey! Blade Runner--?)
Sounds like your talking about electro-shock therepy(sp?). Soryy, I can't go into details about this.
You are perhaps missing the point... Too often, we design new things because we can, rather than designing them because we would like to have them. For example, many of the world's tallest building are erected because an architect wants to prove that he/she can build the tallest building, not because we need to have a skyscraper with several hundred floors. Then we run into problems like people wasting time in elevators, or not being able to evacuate a building if the elevators are broken. In this case, the humans have to conform to technology. Fortunately, the marketing department usually keeps us on track as to what the public wants (or rather, thinks they want). I'm pretty sure that the engineers at Chrysler weren't too happy about designing a boxy minivan, but as the babyboomers had kids, they needed more space in their vehicles. Thus humans dictated the new design. It works both ways. If I'm on the phone and an important person calls, I'd like to be notified with a little beep, but if I'm talking to someone who gets a beep, I'll feel insulted if they want to talk to the other person. This is the essence of engineering. Just my 2cents...
Think Microsoft is bad? I recall reading that a good percentage of our DNA is probably just garbage, leftovers from the days of our proto-simian forebears. No one, of course, would be so brave to try to strip out the useless code (even if they could) and no one would presume that they knew what the code did. But imagine if we could alter a few sequences here or there, maybe modify the brain chemical soup slightly to allow faster or greater interconnections. Maybe boost that 5-7 things at once in memory by an order of magnitude. I am awestruck by those who can visualize complex equations immediately and without paper. Imagine if we could do this for everyone. When Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, I was saddened, but only because chess lost some of its prestige and not for lack of faith in the brain. KL
>think about other machines that exceed human abilities, but we don't much worry about them.
In less than 50 years there will be machines that beats us in dexterity and intelligence. Its difficult to say what happens next, but it isn't a change that you could compare to cars or rockets.
From the moment these intelligent machines exist, technological change becomes unimaginably fast- machines designing better machines.
People will be strangely irrelevant.
But are there things that can make us smarter then the machines we've made? Well I'm sure most machines would be smart enough to know that the above statement should read than the machines we've made.
Yes, there is substantial evidence of micro-psychokenetic (mind over matter) and precognitive (perception of the future) abilities that some or all humans possess. Of course science is still far away from understanding these anamolies and strangely enough, no one seems to have suggested a practical use for these skills. Still, I doubt we'll be seeing psychic computers any time soon... Although now -I'm- curious. With proper wiring, could a computer change the outcome of various events? I don't know how one would test something like this as positive results might suggest the programmers influence. :) There is also an observed retro-psychokenesis effect in which the human mind effects the unobserved outcome of events that took place in the past. As computers are often used to gather, store, and distribute the data before the human subject sees the outcome, it seems reasonable to assume that computers can not exhibit this same effect. Further more, it suggests that humans do in fact possess a unique gift that can not easily be recreated in a machine.
its seems obvious that if you have a loop -
r imordial.html
machine designs better machine that designs better machine etc.
things are going to change fast.
>but do YOU know anything about what they do?
maybe they will use genetic algorithms. there is no need to understand how things work.
http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/ai/p
of course machines won't replace how people relate to other people but they will replace all programmers and scientists.
His other books, including "Things that Make Us Smart" reviewed here, are all fascinating reads, but none approach just the fundamental 'correctness' of "Everyday Things." Buy, borrow, or steal this book, and take every word to heart.
Shame we're running a chemical system where voltage is highly regulated and important.
The brain is worse than a P2, irregular voltage and you just sit there and twitch.
I beleive most of intelligence grew with evolution. The human brain wasn't always as smart as it was. But as generations use their brain for stimulant thoughts and calculations, generations after will have their brains more engineered for this type of thinking. The human race will continue to become smarter and evolve and change in ways we can not see now, only speculate. I beleive the human race is in the process of perfecting itself.
I beleive most of intelligence grew with evolution. The human brain wasn't always as smart as it was. But as generations use their brain for stimulant thoughts and calculations, generations after will have their brains more engineered for this type of thinking. The human race will continue to become smarter and evolve and change in ways we can not see now, only speculate. I beleive the human race is in the process of perfecting itself. Evolution is truely amazing.
An interesting question. Intuitively I would hope that our brain continues to evolve and get bigger. Unfortunately there are many factors that limit the scalability of the human brain, from signal propagation delays to the anatomy of the female pelvis (limiting the size of the cranium when we're born). So it seems that we've already hit a hardware limit that can't be easily expanded unless we start to completely redesign the human race.
As for our current mental abilities, we have to deal with a phenomenon called information overload, which has been empirically proved on numerous occasions. I guess we'll run into it more often as our environment gets increasingly complicated.
of course machines won't replace how people relate to other people but they will replace all programmers and scientists
I really doubt it. About half of programming, in my experience, is translating fuzzy half-thought-out human ideas into a definite specification. I'm not saying you couldn't build a robot to do it, just that humans will be able to do it more cheaply. I mean most low-wage manual labor today (and I speak from experience) could certainly be done by robots, but where are you gonna rent a robot for 5 bucks an hour?
Human programmers will certainly use smarter and smarter tools to be more productive, that's nothing new, I hardly ever code in ones and zeroes anymore. But the step of translating 'I want a program that kinda sorta does something like this sometimes' into an algorithm will probably be done by human labor for the forseeable future.
To sum up, we'll do what's best for the propagation of our genes. Not the genes of other humans.
Not quite true. It's more like there is a hierarchy of genetic similarity, and the farther up the hierarchy the more you will do to preserve the genes, i.e. children->immediate family->extended family->clan->race->species->genus
etc.
Our behaviour is now determined (mostly) by what we consider good for ourselves, rather than what is good for our genes.
This is wrong. Evolution doesn't care how smart (you think) you are. Or do you really not believe that there are genetic traits that might influence whether someone has no or fewer children in order to pursue a career? Natural selection will continue, no matter how arrogant we get.
And when a machine _knows_ it's ignorant then it's smarter.
So far machines have totally no idea of what they don't know. If they don't know something, it just isn't there. Whereas if humans don't know something it could be
1) Totally not there. Not in mind at all.
2) Thought I knew it, but not really when comes down to it- blind spot.
3) Can make a good guess.
And more importantly
Humans can say:
I will be able to understand that,
a) Just give me a moment.
b) But it will take me two days
c) But I think you should ask Susan, she's better at that.
Show me a machine which can tell me that.
So far the machines still look like tools to me, whereas people are still amazing. OK so some foolish people tend to prefer machine behaviour.
Cheerio,
Link.
It's called "The Bazaar" :)
> (dictating code would be cool)
Yeah, but wouldn't it be better to tell the machine what you want and it creates the app for you?!
will probably be done by human labor for the forseeable future.
sure, and after that it will be done by very cheap machines. the "forseeable future" is less than fifty years
Plato gives a Socrates quote deriding writing as a crutch to good memory and more falsifiable than a good witness. Writing is one of the first artifical cognitive aids, of which computer "intelligence" is a still imperfect descendent.
Isn't it ironic that such a statement (which is true, btw) would show up on a Linux related site? Linux is the epitome of user-hostile design. Reading this book (and using a Mac for a month or two) would probably open some eyes aroung here.
Your point? We kill other humans all the time, oftentimes for some pretty silly reasons (aka, nationalism). I don't think that assuring our place as top of earth's evolutionary ladder is at all as trivial as you seem to assume it is.
Trust me -- if humanity in general ever had reason to think that its place at the top of the evolutionary food chain was in contest, we'd do what we had to do to ensure that is wasn't -- even if it means killing a potentially intelligent and sentiant being and (if necessesary, or maybe even if not) its creators. It's kind of a sad commentary, but we can't help it. It's hardcoded into our DNA by the experience of a thousand generations.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
At that point, it'll be interesting to see if Darwin takes over. I don't foresee a "Terminator"-type war or anything like that; chances are we'd just get nervous and lobotomize or power off the thing.
I'm thinking that the evolutionary imperatives hardcoded into our wetware will probably eventually doom any really generally intelligent system. Instead, you'll probably see a Star Wars-type solution where you have systems that do one or two things really well, but are functionally inept in other places (C3P0 can understand 10 million forms of communication, but a unilingual battle droid could kick his shiny metal ass). That was, we can remain the masters (which, as a human, is the way I prefer it).
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Your arguements ahve nothing to do with this book. You are looking at what you think this book says, what the mac is, and assume that the mac is the end all of human factors.
Not so. A large part of user interface design is speeding up the expert. There are people who count the milliseconds it takes to complete a task.
Sure, as an expert Unix is more productive then windows could be (if you were an expert in windows instead). Windows assumes some things that are not true for you, but are for most people. When playing a game windows is the wrong way to go, which is why most games bypass windows for a single full screen task.
Your transmission arguement is a recignised part of human factors. AT&T spends a lot of money building a system that only expert operators can use, and then a lot of money training operators to beocme experts. They are not stuipd, they know that the expert only system will in the end save them money as the expert operators need less time to do their job, meaning they can help more people faster. This system that AT&T has designed is considered one of the triumphs of user interface design.
proper user interface design requires the goals be set in stone. In AT&Ts case speed was the number one goal, in the macs case they can sacrafice a little speed once in a while. However Bruce Tognisky in TOG on Interface reports that for some operations users who used the keyboard shortcuts said they got the job done faster, but the stop watch said otherwise! This is regaurds a few very specific situations, and can't be generalized to everything. The point can though: Often while you think you are productive you are less productive, you just feel like you are working. Step back and examine your habbits objectivly, is Unix more productive or does it just seem that way because you have to think about the way to do things as opposed to the mac where you mearly had to move the mouse to the right position.
The way I look at it, the Open Source model forces a software corporation to abandon it's original business model, which is renting intellectual property, along with a little marketshare enforcement via proprietary protocols and file formats, and adopt a business model of selling service.
Now, if a company makes all of it's money off of supporting it's product, there's NO incentive to engineer useability into that product.
Now, we all know that if a software engineer put enough effort into automation and UI design that a kindergartner with a mouse could effectively admin a network of database servers. (we're talking ideal situations here). But if they can't make money off of supporting the software (because the software supports itself), and if they can't make money selling software licenses, and forcing upgrades, etc., then they can't make money period.
Put that in your Bazarr Cathedral and smoke it.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The brain is designed to accept certain things being in it, and not others. Perhaps by "fooling" the brain into accepting a nanochip, we can avoid the whole rejection problem altogether. Again, our theoretical neuro-chemicals come into play, but it isn't really all that hard to see as a reality...
I'm no doctor, but I was under the impression that rejection took place on a far lower level than sentience. I thought rejection was purely chemical in nature...?
I've always wondered why so much effort is spent in AI and trying to develop a computer that can think. What's the point? Computers are useful precisely *because* they are deterministic, fast at simple arithmetic and boolean operations, and able to store huge quantities of data -- all categories where the human mind happens to be less than perfect. Personally, I suspect that human intelligence is a design compromise -- that, for example, pattern-recognition and more 'fuzzy' logic needed to deal with ambiguity come at the expense of being a little finite-state machine. (yeah, computers can do this stuff, the same way humans can do coordinate space transformations..) And even if someone does build a intelligent machine, what's the point?
It just seems like a big gee-whiz project to me. Maybe it's created 'incidental' advances in other areas of computing, but I think that once someone gets voice recognition working, the only AI project -that I'm aware of- which seems to have really interesting possibilities (dictating code would be cool) will be done.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
That was exactly my point, but I once again managed to make it as clear as ketchup. A healthy brain is most likely already operating at 'optimum efficiency'.
Still the analogy with a neural network holds...
If one node sends information to another node faster than that node can process information, communication is stalled, or data loss occurs.
Cranking up the voltage doesn't make a CPU run faster, just hotter, and if you overdo it just a teenie tiny bit it stops working.
The brain is a 'neural' computer. One of the factors that determines the speed of a neural system is the number of 'neurons'. If you could increase the number of neurons in your brain, and manage to insert them in the right place, you might find an increase in speed. The reverse is observed regularly. Brain damage that randomly takes out neurons, (due to diseases like altzheimer or encephalitis or drug/alcohol abuse for instance) often causes the victim to think more slowly, and have a lowered IQ.
Another factor in overall speed is the speed of communication between the 'neurons'. This communication takes place via chemicals called neuro transmitters. If you could find a way to optimize the transmission or production of neurotransmitters in your brain you might increase the efficieny of communication, and thereby overall speed.
The reverse is often observed. Horrible diseases like parkinson's disease decrease the availability of neurotransmitters (dopamine in the case of parkinson), causing the poor victims (among many other things) to think more slowly, sometimes coming to an almost complete stop.
Also, many people use drugs to manipulate the levels of certain neurotransmitters. This seems to decrease the efficiency of the brain, although users of cocaine may not actually notice they are speaking raving nonsense when they're high, and long term users often display a decrease in receptors for certain neurotransmitters, probably caused by the brain trying to compensate for the abnormal levels of the chemical (some patients of diseases of the brain benefit by prescription drugs that manipulate levels of neurotransmitters, but if it ain't broken, don't fix it).
There are probably other properties that determine the speed of a neural network, but I don't know much about the subject. Could someone post a link to some info?
I think that's what caffeine is for.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
My new sig...
We are Borg, resistance is futile....
me: DHEA, L-cys., DMAE, 5-HTP...
diva Pasty Drone NewsTrolls, Inc.
The way I feel is that, yes, poetry is a lingual thing. And now I will enter a subject known as "theology". Angels communicate via telepathy--they're beings of spirit, after all, as opposed to beings with physical manifestations such as ourselves. They sing praises to God, and I have gotten the impression that the praises are beautiful.
Anyway, in this half-baked bit of philosophy, perhaps there are/can be subtle nuances to telepathic communication that we, being non-telepathic, can't think of, as we've never experienced the medium. Or perhaps someone's memory of an ocean beach may actually be better in some way than poetry describing it.
Not that poetry isn't a really neat (albeit one might say primitive ) art form. When I played around with a GCS called ZZT (zzt.org may still be up, if not, zeux.org has a ZZT section... ), and we tried to squeeze as much as we could out of it--people figured out how to develop several different genres of games out of the inherent top-down sort of thing. Its graphics were plain ASCII, but people squeezed really nifty graphics out of it--lush forests, arid deserts, etc.
We did this despite the numerous other systems available, such as actually programming with C or Pascal (barring the hurdles that we call difficulty and learning )
Anyway... I wonder if angels play around with language and poetry. We certainly could still do so if we developed some kind of primitive thought-transfer... system.
But, as a side note, this was generated on-the-fly and is fairly stupid, and such.
If you've ever seen One Flew Over The Coo-coo's Nest, you're probably familiar with electro-shock therapy. It's similar to what a defibrilator does, only for the brain. It is used to disrupt the electrical pattern of the brain for a variety of reasons... Ending an epileptic siesure is one, stupification (forced complacency and the removal of higher level free thought) is another.
:)
Raising the charge in the brain is a very bad idea since the circuitry is designed for a very specific environment. However...
Boosting the levels of neurotransmitters that facilitate signal propagation across the synaptic gap might be promissing. This is what many drugs do. But, while drugs tend to act on the brain as a whole, with a particular tweak in the pleasure center areas, a boost in the cognitive or sensory regions might be what you're proposing. This, coupled with repeatedly firing the desired pathways in order to 'pave the road' for future use, should improve whatever skill or perception you're interested in boosing.
I'd recommend plenty of rest, exercise, a balanced diet, productive intellectual activity and adequate fresh air.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
You'd likely die.
;)
The electrical impulses that run throughout the brain are the result of highly complex chemical reactions. Overclocking a computer is, in a very real sense, like trying to run 100 pounds-per-inch of water through a pipe only rated for 90: it might work, but don't blame the manufacturer if you bust the thing.
Brains, on the other hand, are parts of bodies, which produce their own electricity (synthesized from nutrients and oxygen). Just adding more electricity to the mix would cause seizures, the possible disruption of autonomic processes (like your heartbeat), et cetera.
And, if you do it enough, you'll explode. But anyone who watched Max Headroom knows that.
Suppose you had a cake recipe that said "...bake at 250F for 30 minutes". If you cranked up your oven to 750F, could you bake the same cake in 10 minutes? No, you'd probably end up with something that was charred on the outside and undercooked on the inside. I suspect that "overclocking the brain" would lead to a similar result.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
However... speed isn't everything. Massive parallellism is incredibly powerful.
Michael Chermside
We really don't know what the limits of our brain is. We have examples of idiot savants and autistic people as extremes, but they aren't quite right. Or child geniuses, prodigies, and talent.
I'd imagine that, as fast as we make our artificial brains and intelligences, that people would keep up and stay ahead. I'd imagine it would actually be easier to train and grow a person surrounded by weather data all their life and have a much more accurate prediction device than any supercomputer.
Ick. Imagine. A kid, from birth, born blind and deaf but hooked up through various sensors to weather devices all over the world, and as an a adult being able to 'see' weather?
We'll come up with ever more efficient message passing algorithms and encoding methods to overcome the natural inefficiency of communication, and begin to harness the power of multiprocessing, human style.
We'll figure out how to train, teach, and educate kids so that we stay ahead of the race. Everyone knows how much of a joke most school systems in the US are, right? How much time is wasted with bullying, rote exercises, stupid lectures? Does anyone else think the system actually slows down and retards the children?
Just how capable are we?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Without going into flames here=)
Newer VW cars have something called tiptronic transmissions; normally they behave as automatic, but when you flip a switch you can control the up or down shift at appropriate RPMs, giving you, in reality, both automatic and manual transmissions in one.
And in the computing world we have BeOS and the soon to be released Mac OSX to give us intuitive interfaces and immediate productivity as well as powerful and useful design.
So it may very well be possible to have your cake and eat it too =)
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I totally agree.
I'm not saying rid ourselves of ambiguity and vagueness. They are way too much fun. But, like Grafiti is to Palms and Visors, some sort of reduced instruction set language for enhanced communications.
Being able to think to each other will open other opportunities for poetry and creativity as well. Imagine 'seeing' someone else's imagination? I believe our imagination is every bit as powerful and stimulating as a real sunset, a real rainbow, a landscape, or artwork. Heck, every piece of art or poetry is, in effect, hampered by our inability to express the concept perfectly, limited as it were by two dimensional mediums, paints, pigments, materials, etc.
Painting across the cyberscape =)
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
A good deal of the research is done in order to better understand ourselves.
There are also those who study just to do it. I don't know that anyone is doing it to make a better brain(yet).
There are also autistic people and idiot savants that actually demonstrate some of the tradeoffs we may have made to gain our intelligence. I also don't know if it can be reconciled, the ability to tap into our brains in the same way and still retain human flexibility and adaptability.
But the fact that people are born with supercomputing capabilities means that it may be very possible, for a slight trade off in social ability or manual dexterity or what-not, to gain ever more brain power.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
How do we know that it's possible to surpass human intelligence? That humans just won't keep advancing? Do we know that there are limitations to what we can do?
I'd say that our brains are marvelously developed but have been underutilized for the past thousand years, barring the musical genius or the uber-warrior-general. We keep pumping information and data into ourselves and our children, and surprisingly, we keep up. Imagine humanity years from now, born plugged into a network, some sort of global consciousness. Is it possible? I think so. Can we keep up? Yes to that, too. Imagine communications without all of the ambiguity and vagueness of body language and speech. Sure it won't be perfect, but it's an incredible vision.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Would anyone be willing to comment on this?
Just how much can we scale? No one really knows, right? We have extreme cases, like idiot savants and autistic people, as well as geniuses and prodigies and such, but as we become ever more connected and ever more indulged with an influx of information and sensory data, will we cope?
I would like to think so. I would imagine that even as computers get faster and more powerful, as we get more resources we'd just adapt more deftly. We'd invent languages and message passing technologies to reduce overhead and miscommunication, and increase the capbility and efficiency of our world. It's now the world of 24x7, right? I guess one of the biggest limitations right now is sleep. Once we can tackle that problem, we'd have twice as much brainpower*time, right?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
What happens if you boost the electrical charge, just a little bit mind you.
You'd turn into a jerry springer fan. The brain's cognitive strengths come from the fact that it's not a binary system; synapeses can be more than just on or off. To that extent, the brain's a lot like a quantum computer (is that in someone's sig?).
If you increase the signal, you're changing the contents of the brain, not making it faster.
Any idea to what extent you would alter someones personality by minutely adjusting the signal to the brain
If you can manage it, there's a Nobel prize in it for you.
Of course, ECT will fry the brain in a random way, but that's not what you were on about, I suspect.
As for governmental intervention: sounds like the CIA's MK-ULTRA experiments (sort of).
Another question, would the persons personality revert to 'normal' if you removed the extra power
My guess is no. The brain works so well because it remembers its state. If it were to reset at the drop of a voltage, we'd all wake up every moring to a brand new experience.
What happens if you boost the electrical charge, just a little bit mind you. Would you be able to theoretically 'overlock' your brain?
Well, first, overclocking has to do with increasing the frequency of the basic 'pulse' of the chip, thus making all operations a bit faster. There is no direct connection with increasing the voltage supplied to the chip. If you just increase the voltage supplied to the CPU, it will not run faster.
Second, if you stick electrodes into a human brain and send appropriate current through appropriate parts, you can get strange and interesting results. A typical effect is being able to remember with perfect clarity a scene that you thought you forgot completely. A Spanish researcher named Delgado (?) did a fair amount of experimentation around 20 years ago. I don't think a lot of people work on it now, mostly for ethical reasons. Most of the work is being done with people who are heavily mentally ill.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I've never taken a course in engineering, but let me ask you guys-- is the idea of "designing in a way that augments our lives, not living in a way that validates our design" really so radical? Do professors still teach that "man conforms" to technology? Do programmers still expect users to learn a new input behavior for each application?
We may create a computer fully aware of itself and others, conscious of all entities in the scope of its senses, capable of reactions and interactions. Capable of solving problems outside a static finite state automaton (or chatoically complex enough to make the states fuzzy).
Emotions and curiosity and multivalent solutions are all within the scope of its abilities. Morality and sensibility can be replicated. Truth and beauty are open to consciousness.
But will it be able to comprehend the abstract natures, the duality between non-linear mathematics and temporal reality. We have never solved these problems to the satisfaction of prediction. (See the satellites slowing down article ...). Will our successor be able to comprehend these things?
If not, will another iteration of intelligence, perhaps an induced wet-matter being to succeed our artificial intelligence, be able to solve these problems?
It is within our capability to do pinch a touch of mathematics and draw out reasonable truths. If the artificial intelligence does not draw these out, will it create intelligence that can? Knowingly doing so might undermine self-preservation, just as our procreation of artificial life undermines our own survival as the dominant species.
Yes, the post might be considered flamebait, but I'm going to treat it as a thread-starter on the issue of user-friendliness.
I challenge the assumption that "users" are all the computer-clueless. I am certainly a user, but I also write software. For me, "user-friendly" takes on a whole different meaning. A Unix-like environment is most certainly friendly to me. I can go beyond interfaces that are designed to be "intuitive" and use interfaces that are designed to be "productive". Do I have to read a few HOWTOs? Yes.
But the time spent learning (for example) VIM is repaid with gained productivity. I get more done in less time once I've mastered the interface.
It is a natural trend when mastering any technology. You start out wanting to be productive right away. Later, as you master the basics, you look for the shortcuts to make yourself more productive.
It may be a fair criticism to say that Unix concentrates on productivity shortcuts at the expense of immediate productivity. It may also be fair to say that interfaces perceived as "friendly" (like the Mac) concentrate on immediate usability at the expense of long-term productivity.
I look at it this way:
A stick shift is not as "friendly" as an automatic transmission. I still prefer a stick because I like having torque on demand. I hate waiting for the RPMs to get high enough for an automatic to downshift when I'm trying to pass a semi. I have more control with the stick.
Comparing Mac to Unix is like comparing automatic to stick. It all depends on what you want to do with your machine. The ultimate interface might combine both, but it might also be so bloated and inconsistent that nobody would want to use it. Can you imagine having both automatic and manual transmissions in your car?
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Isn't it amazing that this topic should come up so near The Programmer's Stone, and yet be seen as a different one? What makes intelligence is understanding, which is the basis of mapping knowledge. (Or is it vice versa?) Machines don't understand anything. Machines can keep a lot of things in memory at once, and perhaps even make connections between these things, but they never (yet) gain any understanding of deeper connections.
This was how Deckard spotted the replicants in Bladerunner. They knew the facts (packing), and even some connections between them, but not the meta-connections (mapping); at some level they failed to make connections that are obvious to most people.
The ability to understand is what makes us smarter than machines. No matter how big and fast the machines are, they don't have imaginary friends.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
(And this is not a troll).
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
It is important to note that nature of human memory is fundamentally different than the externalized computer storage of "memory". If you study neuro-psychology, you will understand that scientists have had utmost difficulty in localising memory in the human brain. That is because human memory is not like RAM at all. Every time you recall something, you are not doing a lookup from a physical-electronic memory address. Instead, the impression is brought up as an entirely new creation within your consciousness. To speak of machine sentience, you must consider this very fundamental difference between machine "memory" and human memory which is an aspect of self-consciousness.
see: http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/Articles/H
Is it not feasable to utilize neuro-reactive chemicals to force faster synaptic responses, keep the "gates" between synapses open, and boost electric signal in the brain?
:-)
Sure - it's called epilepsy.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
How long until Kryotech sells a helmet so you can
cool your brain to -36 degrees celsius so you can overclock it?
However... speed isn't everything. Massive parallellism is incredibly powerful.
now there's an interesting idea. how about getting brains to work together in parallel? I wonder how viable this idea is.
Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts. -- Voltaire
While an electrical impulse travels along the length of a single neuron, the transmission in the gap between neurons (which takes up most of the time and gives you most of the interesting side effects), or synapse, is actually a matter of chemistry.
Which isn't to say that you wouldn't be able to reengineer the brain with electromechanical implants or somesuch - there are some things, like rote memory (as Norman and the reviewer point out), which the brain is bad at. Our eyes, as well - the primary processing could be very much improved, and the brain itself would almost certainly adapt to the increased or more acute signal coming to it. What would be needed is a method to both read and write to the brain, but I think that that is certainly possible given time and dollars.
I would dare say that these would be implemented before a true artificial brain, because when compared to an artificial brain they seem so much easier to accomplish. (Not to mention that they're necessary preliminary steps to creating the artificial brain).
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
You'd turn into a jerry springer fan. The brain's cognitive strengths come from the fact that it's not a binary system; synapeses can be more than just on or off. To that extent, the brain's a lot like a quantum computer (is that in someone's sig?).
If you increase the signal, you're changing the contents of the brain, not making it faster.
Hmmm... Any idea to what extent you would alter someones personality by minutely adjusting the signal to the brain? If what you say is right and altering the signal alters the contents and by extension the personality of someone then you could potentially 'adjust' anyone away from 'undesirable' behaviour with a simple voltage regulator type implant device... Unless the results are unpredictable. I wonder if the government has tried this one on an unsuspecting populace yet?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
If you can manage it, there's a Nobel prize in it for you.
Of course, ECT will fry the brain in a random way, but that's not what you were on about, I suspect.
As for governmental intervention: sounds like the CIA's MK-ULTRA experiments (sort of).
Hmmm... I think I'll go buy a couple of white rats and some general anesthetic... Where's my exacto knife and my electrical tape...>:)
I doubt I could do anything like this by jacking a Rat into a 9v Battery or anything... That'd just toast his head. Someone would need a way to barely increase the voltage until a noticeable difference occured without a significant risk of toasted the subjects brain. I don't think I have the equipment for that in my basement just yet...
Another question, would the persons personality revert to 'normal' if you removed the extra power?
I would so love to test this if I only knew of a safe way of boosting the signal through the brain...
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
In the same breath, i can't help but think of the possibilities of integrating a peice of incredibly fast, single-task peice of hardware into a "slow" or "underdeveloped" portion of the brain, and improving it (the brain). I'm not talking about replacing the entirety of the pink mush, but rather, improving where improvement seems to be needed.
It seems like you would have a LOT of concerns about rejection when implanting something into the brain... I imagine the possibility is there and the technology is almost there, but would even this much of a change in some 'unused' brain portion result in a personality change because of the interference?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
My guess is no. The brain works so well because it remembers its state. If it were to reset at the drop of a voltage, we'd all wake up every moring to a brand new experience.
Hmmm... So, assuming someone found a way to do this, you could nudge the signal a little, keep the signal steady for a few days/weeks/months, then boost it again once the brain was adjusted to it. I wonder if what kind of behavioral patterns this would lead to. I wonder if anyone has tried it? *heads for google*
Heck, if the principle is sound then in theory that would be a way to remove aggressive behaviour from our society (or brainwash the masses into obeying my every whim...).
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Suppose you had a cake recipe that said "...bake at 250F for 30 minutes". If you cranked up your oven to 750F, could you bake the same cake in 10 minutes? No, you'd probably end up with something that was charred on the outside and undercooked on the inside. I suspect that "overclocking the brain" would lead to a similar result
Ahhh, but what if you only pushed it up to say... 260F? You could bake it for 27 minutes and it would come out fine, and voila! you saved 3 minutes.>:) I'm not talking about plugging your head into the wall. I'm talking about a minute signal boost of the electrical impulses flowing through your brain.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Well, first, overclocking has to do with increasing the frequency of the basic 'pulse' of the chip, thus making all operations a bit faster. There is no direct connection with increasing the voltage supplied to the chip. If you just increase the voltage supplied to the CPU, it will not run faster.
Forgive my miswording, sorry about that.
Though as you say here:
Second, if you stick electrodes into a human brain and send appropriate current through appropriate parts, you can get strange and interesting results. A typical effect is being able to remember with perfect clarity a scene that you thought you forgot completely. A Spanish researcher named Delgado (?) did a fair amount of experimentation around 20 years ago. I don't think a lot of people work on it now, mostly for ethical reasons. Most of the work is being done with people who are heavily mentally ill.
Apparently pure current can have an affect on the brain. So it is theoretically possible that what I conjectured is applicable.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
As I was reading the review of this book I had a thought, just a tiny one. The brain is made up of synapses, neurons, etc... These things run off of electrical current much like the processor in the 'puters we have everywhere. Sooo... What happens if you boost the electrical charge, just a little bit mind you. Would you be able to theoretically 'overlock' your brain? What kind of effect would this have on your thought processes?
I doubt it's possible even if I understood more about the workings of the brain than I do, but it's still an interesting idea. We are, after all, only electrical impulses at the base of our thought.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The voltage of electricty does not overclock - increasing frequency does. All you'd achieve with increasing the voltage of any system is burning out connections.
Harry
I don't find it impossible at all for systems to surpass human intelligence. In the past 5 years alone have seen immense advances in representing biological systems in software (neural networks, self organizing feature maps ala Kohonen, etc...).
And what if we build a box with more smarts? A requisite of volition is a value system (what should I do and why?). Do you suppose that a system which surpasses human cognitive abilities would develop an inferior value system? Or would it see value in productive effort (good). Would determine that nihilistic, destructive behavior is evil? Perhaps we might learn something about love and kindness from a digital uber-brain.
Morality, IMHO, doesn't come from on-high, or by vote, but like any other human advance must be discovered.
People didn't say "Alright, here is what it takes to be sentient [or alive], let's go find out what fits our paradigm," they said "Alright, this is sentient [or alive], let's develop a standard to fit it."
Which brings up another point: Can something be sentient, but not alive? One of the current definitions of something being alive is that it can reproduce. If we were able to create a computer that was sentient, but we created it in such a way that it could not produce others like itself, it would be (by current defintions) sentient but not alive.
So our defintions of alive/sentient are biased towards what we know is alive/sentient. We haven't taken into other life forms, because we simply haven't had exposure to them.
Flesh is very special, when you consider that despite all of our intellectual achievements, we haven't come anywhere close to developing something on the same level as the human body (including the brain).
Things can only FEEL and LOVE, because they are living... Without an integral GROWTH or FEELING organism, you will never be able to teach machines how to CARE or LOVE. Logic--with all its merits, cannot be the basis for love, only LIFE can be the basis for love.
Relevant point. Multiple and emotional intelligences might be effectively simulated by "yes/no" logic, but by believing it, are we even greater fools?
Then again, if genetic algorhythms thrive less from our "teaching" and more from their own coopetive evolution, are they not alive? Isn't there some chance that some kinda nano-wetware "machine" clusters will somehow converge with our egomaniacally sentient, self-aware and "living" selves?
Re: "feeling" and "self-awareness" as signs of "intelligence", many suspect that any & all life feels love (as desire to thrive), and fear (as aware of threat to survival). How well "life" avoids fear (pain) and realizes love (pleasure) maybe depends on how intelligence evolves.
I think humans are infinitely scaleable. I think we are naturally technological creatures, and I think the instruments we create are part of the natural cycle of human life. We don't typically think about it this way, but every tool we use is a technological implement of some type, from the fork to the PC. And not merely is our technological advance limited to physical implements. A significant part of human progress is refining intellectual tools, such as logic, languages, and conceptual structures. Such intangible advances have made the "real" ones possible. It's the nature of human being to progress outward towards greater intellectual and "spiritual" capacity (smell a Hegelian here?). I think we've always been inseparable from our technological instruments, and it's only a matter of time before the mechanical devices we create become physically (eventually, intellectually) integrated into ourselves.
I noticed this quote at the bottom of the page after reading this article:
... though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War" "
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When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
When computers can consistently pass the Turing Test (or some equivalent response-based criteria) over a wide range of testers, I'll consider them as sentient as humans. Because when you get down to it, everyday life is nothing more than an extended version of the Turing Test. Think about it, why do we consider humans to be sentient? We are nowhere near understanding how the human mind truly works. All we really have to base our ideas of sentience on are people's actions, reactions, and flesh. And frankly I don't think the flesh is all that special. Figuratively speaking, it's just the medium on which the code is stored on.